Forget oil! Coffee price hits 34-year high

Plenty of people are worrying about the skyrocketing price of oil and how it might ruin the world’s fragile economic recovery. But what really keeps the workers of the world going is coffee, as anyone with any sense knows, and that’s the price you should be worried about!

It’s at a 34-year high, the most expensive it’s ever been since the invention of the half-caf skinny latte or the tall caramel mocha with whipped cream.

Brent crude oil may be at $124 a barrel due to fighting in Libya and the approach of America’s summer roadtrip season, but coffee’s at $3 a pound and no one’s sure why. The last time a pound of arabica coffee beans cost this much was 1977, when the Oakland Raiders won the Super Bowl, Jimmy Carter was president, and singer Shakira, boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr., Patriots QB Tom Brady and actors Orlando Bloom and Liv Tyler were born. Yes, if you remember that year, you are old, and therefore you need coffee more than ever.

Some people think rain in Colombia, which grows a lot of coffee, hurt harvests and prices, and maybe that has something to do with it. Harvests haven’t been great in Mexico or Vietnam or Indonesia, either.

But that ain’t what’s really going on.

Who is the bogeyman we blame every time something goes wrong in our economy?

Who blocks our beloved Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and forces its executives to kowtow or move their servers?

Who locks up Nobel Prize winners?

Who tramples on Tibet? Whose army is flexing its muscles in Asia? Whose military spending forces us to keep ours high?

You guessed it! The country responsible for the looming rise in the price of your cappuccino? That’s right: China!

How’s that work? Well, when more than a billion people in China see their standard of living rising, they start drinking more coffee and better coffee. And they suck up a huge percentage of the world’s most precious resource.

So when Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) and Peet’s (NASDAQ: PEET) start charging you more, as they will inevitably have to do -- you know who to write to. He protected our tires, now let him protect our java.